Monthly Archives: January 2015

And yet, on reflection, Rifkin’s examples turn out to be anything but collaborative at their heart. Companies such as Uber and Airbnb are fiercely profit-driven, taking large cuts from all the exchanges they facilitate. They are middlemen themselves, albeit somewhat … Continue reading →

Culture is a paradoxical commodity. It is so completely subject to the law of exchange that it is no longer exchanged; it is so blindly equated with use that it can no longer be used. For this reason it merges … Continue reading →

In Philip K. Dick’s The Simulacra, there’s a tiny, ill-defined creature named the papoola. We never see a real papoola in the novel, but instead several characters interact with a robotic replica of the papoola (shades of Do Androids Dream of Electric … Continue reading →

“we are fragmented and multifaceted bbs” The Cybertwee Manifesto is a fascinating document. Infinitely more tolerable than every other manifesto you’re attempted to read, it is a call for an understanding of the body as an emotional machine without reducing either … Continue reading →

Frank Lantz recently wrote a post at Gamasutra about formalism. It is fundamentally about the stakes of formalism, what self-described formalists do and do not do, and how he sees the current world of video games. The much-quoted paragraph … Continue reading →